#11 Archive!
For the past couple of years I’ve been assisting the construction of an archive of my digital work. Led by the Bekker scholar Dr Agnieszka Przybyszewska from the University of Lodz, built by my frequent collaborator Chris Joseph, with intro films created by Rachel Pownall, the archive is ready to launch. It spans my earliest works, like ‘Branded: the Typing Version’ a tiny html story I hand-coded myself with a borrowed piece of javascript back in 2002, to the most recent, my smartphone ghost story, ‘Breathe’.
Working on the archive has been an interesting process of revisiting work I’ve created over the past nearly twenty-five years. I’m not given to rereading my own work once it is published, I’ve always been more interested in what comes next than what happened yesterday. Revisiting these works has been a double-edged experience: it has made me feel old, but it has also made me feel proud of what my collaborators and I have accomplished.
In 2021 I was awarded the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Acheivement Award by the Electronic Literature Organisation. When I look at the work showcased here, which includes a few pieces that exist solely through documentation, I now feel a sense of yes, my collaborators and I really have achieved something together and there are works here that deserve to be celebrated. And although I am slightly stymied at the moment by the prevalence of vast corporate walled gardens online and the rapid and much-hyped rise of AI tools, I will continue to work in digital because I believe this endlessly evolving realm allows us to find new ways to tell new kinds of stories that reach new audiences.
I owe a debt to many people, but especially Dr Agnieszka Przybyszewska, without whom this project would not have happened. Our next step will be to finalise the updates and additions to the collection of my work on The NEXT: Museum, Library and Preservation Space which is hosted by the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver. In addition Dr Przybyszewska is currently writing a scholarly monograph on my digital work.
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Two book recommendations: a novel The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio, a hugely entertaining read; and a work of non-fiction, Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe, an absolutely extraordinary and compelling look at the Troubles and the IRA. These books couldn’t be more different from each other but somehow together remind me of why reading is such an incredibly wonderful thing.
I went to Venice, to see this year’s Biennale Arte. I’d like to be stuck in a time warp where every week is the week I’m at the Biennale. It would be tiring (so many steps) but endlessly inspiring.
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